inconvenient
to find the omnipresent words _no_ and _know_ excluding each other:
and the same is true of _sea_ and _see_; if you are writing of the
_sea_ then the verb _to see_ is forbidden, or at least needs some
handling.

I see the deep's untrampled floor
With green and purple seaweeds strewn:

here _seaweeds_ is risky, but _I see the sea's untrampled floor_ would
have been impossible: even the familiar

The sea saw that and fled

is almost comical, especially because 'sea saw' has a most
compromising joint-tenant in the children's rocking game

See saw Margery daw.

The awkwardness of these English homophones is much increased by the
absence of inflection, and I suppose it was the richness of their
inflections which made the Greeks so indifferent (apparently) to
syllabic recurrences that displease us: moreover, the likeness in
sound between their similar syllables was much obscured by a verbal
accent which respected the inflection and disregarded the stem,
whereas our accent is generally faithful to the root.[10] This
sensitiveness to the sound of syllables is of the essence of our best
English, and where the effect is most magical in our great poets it is
impossible to analyse.

[Footnote 10: Wherever this is not so--as in _rhetoric_, _rhetorical_,
_rhetorician_, _company_, _companion_, &c.--we have a greater freedom
in the use of the words. Such words, as Dr. Bradley points out,
giving _Canada_, _Canadian_ as example, are often phonetic varieties
due to an imported foreign syntax, and their pronunciation implies
familiarity with literature and the written forms: but very often
they are purely the result of our native syllabising, not only in
displacement of accent (as in the first example above) but also by
modification of the accented vowel according to its position in the
word, the general tendency being to make long vowels in monosyllables
and in penultimate accents, but short vowels in antepenultimate
accents. Thus come such differences of sound between _opus_ and
_opera_, _omen_ and _ominous_, _virus_ and _virulent_, _miser_ and
_miserable_, _nation_ and _national_, _patron_ and _patronage_,
_legal_ and _legislate_, _grave_ and _gravity_, _globe_ and
_globular_, _grade_ and _gradual_, _genus_ and _general_, _female_
and _feminine_, _fable_ and _fabulous_, &c. In such disguising of the
root-sound the main effect, as Dr. Bradley says, is the power to free
the derivative from an intense meani